03 May 2013

The Porn Singularity

One could say that I had the misfortune of my adolescence overlapping almost perfectly with the last few years prior to the ‘pornographic singularity.’ I speak here of the internet, circa 1995 and later. Prior to this era of the ‘pornographic explosion’ one often had to rely upon a lax or absentee father of a friend, from whom the porn was ‘borrowed,’ and then returned with the owner none the wiser. . . . I recall realizing that something radical had occurred when visiting my family and observing my brother, who was 8 at the time, deleting porn spam from his Hotmail account. Porn as nuisance rather than treasure would have amazed my adolescent self.

For anyone out there is doesn't know, there is now and has been for a long time, an essentially unlimited amount of hard core, video, non-child pornography of every type available on the Internet for free to anyone capable of putting key words into a Google search whose computer isn't filtered and few people have effective filters on their home computers (although many business, school and library computers are effectively filtered). Apparently, some people still pay to purchase pornography in non-streaming formats and over the Internet, but an ability to pay certainly isn't necessary for anyone with unfiltered Internet access.

This is notable not just because pornography is more available, but because the character of the pornography that was available is different. Much of pre-1995 porn sales involved erotic nude photography and implied but not directly depicted sex acts and lacked sound and video. Much of pre-1995 porn sales of materials that were more explicit in depicting sex acts was less "hardcore". The explosion in access to explicit video depicting many individual orgies, bestiality, S&M, fetish porn, and the like has been far more dramatic than the increase in access to images of naked twenty-something girl's next door posed suggestively.

I was a law school graduate and newlywed around the time that the "pornographic singularity" hit and as a result didn't notice it until quite a few years later.

Pornography and Rape

The number of rapes per 1,000 people has declined steadily since about 1990 by about 32% in all from the peak to the present (to roughly 1975 levels), more or less in line with the decline a broad spectrum of serious crimes of all kinds in that time period. The same period also saw great declines in high school dropout rates and teen pregnancy rates, especially for minorities, declines in non-geriatric deaths from almost causes other than prescription drug overdoses, and immense increases in incarceration rates.

Theses overall trends at attributed to a variety of causes: the aging of the baby boomers, the crime impact of greater availability of abortion and declining levels of lead poisoning, greater institutionalization levels as prisons willed while impatient mental health care facilities emptied, sustained economic prosperity subject to only relatively minor speed bumps, increasing education levels, public awareness campaigns, a collapse of the drug trade, new policing strategies, and stronger anti-crime technologies that made crime less profitable and more risky (from anti-theft devices in cars to DNA testing to widespread use of surveillance video).

Current rates of reported rape are not terribly low by historical standard, unlike many other serious crimes (such as homicide), however. Rape incidence is still about three times as high as they were in 1960, and increased steadily from 1960 to 1990 by more than a factor of four.

Some of the increase in rape incidence relative to 1960 may be due to greater reporting of rapes and broader acceptance of a broader definition of what constitutes reportable rape in the living law of every day culture (there have been shifts in formal legal definitions of rape as well, but they have been more subtle) driven largely by the feminist movement.

But, quite a bit of increased incidence, to the extent that exceeds increases in other kinds of serious crimes, is also probably due to the fact that men and women have opportunities to interact with each other in relatively unsupervised situations that are far more expansive than they were in 1960 (also as a result of the feminist movement) and create more opportunities for crimes to take place.

In an era when female college students and young adults were essentially locked in their dorms and homes at night for the most part until they were swiftly married and expected to stay at home away from non-family men and have children, there were fewer occasions in which a woman was in a place where a man (other than her husband) could rape her.

No one seriously suggests that we should return to that regime (and even at the 1990 peak 2499 out of 2500 women did not report a rape to authorities in any given year v. 9,999 out of 10,000 in 1960), because it so greatly benefits women who are not raped. But surely, these changes in the daily lives of women did have some measurable impact.

It also isn't unfair to observe that one reason for the declining precautions against rape was that the downside consequences of rape for a victim were mitigated by wider use of birth control pills and abortion and declining social sanctions suffered by women who weren't virgins, and did not reflect the still limited awareness of the risks associated with serious and incurable sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS. The consequences of rape were and continue to be serious, but they weren't as catastrophic for the average victim in 1990 as they were in 1960.

Some explanations of declining rape incidence point to decreased "demand" on the part of rapists, as sex has become easier for men who aren't married to obtain. But, the timing is wrong. The sexual revolution started to happen just as rape incidence was rising, and was rolling into a "counter-revolution" as it began to fall. The proportion of men who are single has increased dramatically (and single men have sex much less often than married men, even in the post-sexual revolution world).

It isn't at all obvious that the motives of rapists are comparable to the motives of ordinary single men who can't find someone to sleep with them - i.e. it seems likely that men who commit the rapes that end up in crime statistics have a quite different profile from the vast majority of men. Incarcerated rapists aren't that different in demographics or traits like mental health, education, unemployment and intelligence from other violent criminals. Incarcerated rapists have more in common with murderers, carjackers, home invasion burglars, robbers and men who commit aggravated assaults than they do with the growing ranks of ordinary, single, young adult men.

As Razib explains:

I’m not claiming that the correlation is causal. Rather, I’m pointing out that the explosion in porn use does not seem to have led to a concomitant explosion in sex crimes, which would have been the prediction by social conservatives and radical feminists if they could have known of the extent of penetration of pornography into culture and private lives over the next 20 years in 1990.

I agree with his conclusion that while the decline in rape incidence was not materially caused by the explosion of access to pornography, that the decline, viewed in the context of declines in rates of other serious crimes, does support the conclusion that an explosion in access to pornography did not lead to any material increase in the number of rapes committed relative to what we would have seen without this factor.

The assumptions of freedom of speech doctrines that distinguish strongly between acts and words have turned out to be empirically well supported.

Footnote: Razib also make a quite insightful observation: "Kissing a woman is preferable for a heterosexual man not just because a woman has smooth skin, and attractive facial features, but because the target of their affections is a woman."